THE BOY SETTLERS: A Story of Early Times in Kansas. Illustrated by W.A. Rogers

pp. x, 252 +Plus 16 leaves of B/W plates. 12mo. 200mm. Original publisher's pictorial full gray cloth binding lettered in gilt and decorated in brown and silver gilt. Cover depicts a boy holding a rifle staining above a dead bison. Spine lettered and decorated similarly. Cover gilt bright but board is soiled. Spine faded and soiled. Some wear to base and head of spine. Corners frayed. Slight soiling to rear board. Contents clean. Hardbound. Very Good. Noah Brooks (1830-1903) was a journalist and editor who worked for newspapers in Sacramento, San Francisco, Newark, and New York, and authored a major biography of Abraham Lincoln based on close personal observation. Born in Castine, Maine, he moved to Dixon, Illinois in 1856, where he became involved in the first Republican campaign for President (John Fremont). During the campaign, he became friends with Lincoln. Brooks moved to Kansas in 1857 as a "free state" settler, but returned to Illinois about a year later, then moved to California in 1859. After the death of his wife in 1862, Brooks moved to Washington, D.C. to cover the Lincoln administration for the Sacramento Daily Union. He was accepted into the Lincoln household as an old friend. Unlike most people, Brooks was able to maintain a close friendship with both the President and Mrs. Lincoln. When Brooks was detailed to cover the 1864 Democratic Convention in Chicago, President Lincoln asked Brooks to also report back in detail by private letter. In 1901, Brooks published The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition based largely on the Nicholas Biddle history of the Expedition. Brooks was assisted by the notes written in the margins of his manuscript by Dr. Elliott Coues, who had edited the 1894 edition of Biddle, and who had wide experience as an explorer of the American West. William Allen Rogers (1854-1931) was an American political cartoonist born in Springfield, Ohio. He studied at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Wittenberg College, but never graduated. Rogers taught himself to draw and began submitting political cartoons to Midwestern newspapers in his teens. At the age of fourteen, his first cartoons appeared in a Dayton, Ohio-based newspaper, to which Rogers' mother had earlier submitted a selection of his sketches. NW63